‘Like a thief’: Putin steals into Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a surprise tour “like a thief in the night” to inspect Mariupol, the Ukrainian city his troops have utterly destroyed.
Mr Putin’s first visit to Ukraine since the start of his invasion triggered an angry reaction from Kyiv, with a presidential aide blasting it as an act of “cynicism”.
“The criminal always returns to the crime scene … the murderer of thousands of Mariupol families came to admire the ruins of the city and (its) graves. Cynicism and lack of remorse,” Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak wrote on Twitter.
Hours after Mr Putin visited Crimea to mark the ninth anniversary of the peninsula’s annexation, video distributed by the Kremlin showed him landing by helicopter in Mariupol. He then got in a car and drove himself around to inspect the devastation wrought by his troops.
Mariupol’s Ukrainian mayor in exile Vadym Boychenko said Mariupol was “personal” to Mr Putin.
“We have to understand that Mariupol is a symbolic place for Putin, because of the fury he inflicted on the city of Mariupol,” he told the BBC.
“No other city was destroyed like that. No other city was under siege for so long. No other city was subjected to carpet bombing.
“He has come in person to see what he has done.”
The BBC tracked part of the route he took, driving down Kuprina St, turning into Myru Avenue and then into Metalurhiv Avenue, close to the locations of several brutal attacks, including Theatre Square where shelling killed up to 600 civilians, including children, who had been using the building as a refuge.
He also drove near Mariupol’s Maternity Hospital Number Three which was bombed last March.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters the visit took place “very late” on Saturday and into the early hours of Sunday.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said Mr Putin visited the city at night “as befits a thief”.
The Kremlin said he visited a rebuilt musical theatre and followed the presentation of a report on reconstruction work. He was taken on a walking tour of the rebuilt Nevesy district, guided by his Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin.
He visited an apartment where Russian media said he spoke to local residents.
“We’re praying for you,” a resident told him, referring to the city as “a little piece of paradise”, according to images broadcast by Russian TV.
It was Mr Putin’s first trip to the eastern Donbas region since he launched the invasion in February 2022, and comes almost a year after Moscow announced the capture of Mariupol after a campaign that saw the destruction of the Azovstal steel works, the last holdout of Ukrainian forces in the strategic port city.
Mariupol was destroyed after Moscow relentlessly bombarded the city, on the shores of the Sea of Azov, and subjected it to a brutal siege.
Mr Putin’s weekend visits came before a trip to Moscow this week by Chinese President Xi Jinping, widely seen as a diplomatic coup for Mr Putin, who welcomed China’s willingness to play a “constructive role” in ending the conflict in Ukraine, saying Sino-Russian relations were “at the highest point”.
The quality of ties between Moscow and Beijing is “higher than the political and military unions of the Cold War era”, Putin said.